Gone are the days when determining what database software and hardware you needed was as easy as picking up the phone and asking your current vendor, most likely IBM.
Vendors such as Sybase Inc. and Oracle Corp. have made it possible to migrate database systems from their former sole purview — mainframe computers — to midrange-sized systems from most major hardware vendors.
And with the trend toward open systems, users who once would have been locked into a proprietary solution…

Rainforests remain troubled.
The pressure to exploit the Earth’s last remaining resources has extended into the far reaches of the globe and into rainforest regions inhabited mostly by small, isolated communities of indigenous people. These communities are very much affected by the world’s market economy and are all too often the victims of those who wish to seize control of their lands.
In 1989, Cultural Survival, a non-profit human rights organization, established a trading division called Cultural Survival Enterprises (CSE).…

Sometimes it appears the political process is just one big horse race. The thoroughbreds – elected officials – jockey for position and race flat out, while the rest of us gamble on the outcome. While it is unrealistic to expect any administration to reshape the policies that have governed America’s public lands for the past 12 years, it is fair to evaluate how the environmental community’s pick, Bill Clinton, is doing. The short answer: he’s got quite a distance to…

One hundred years ago this coming May, the great 19th century explorer, writer, and naturalist John Muir co-founded an organization called the Sierra Club to work to protect California’s Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada. Muir had seen much of America’s wild areas: As a 30-year-old in 1867, he had walked 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1869, as a sheepherder, he experienced the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada for the first time–and spent the next…

There are a lot of scenarios that will cause you to lose your files on a server. One of the scenarios that can possibly happen is accidentally getting our files corrupted because you might have plugged in something to your device that is not compatible to the system or maybe the system of the device you plugged in is simply not built for your computer. In this kind of situation, you will need to back up your files prior the…

Facing a tax dispute is not an easy problem. There are a number of things to keep in mind, especially that the IRS can take hold on all your financial accounts. So in order to manage this tax dispute, you have to know how to get the best help with back taxes. First, you have to know the tax professionals in your area. It can be a certified public accountant or a tax lawyer who can potentially help you out…

Get ready for a couple of decades of ugly hurricanes. Here’s why.
Did that humongous wall of water in this summer’s hit movie The Perfect Storm blow your mind? Well, that’s entertainment. No wave that size was actually recorded during the real “perfect storm” in 1991.
Still, Atlantic storms can be fierce — and could be getting fiercer. Global climate change could soon whip up hurricanes unlike any ever seen before, say scientists.
MONSTER STORMS
The last several years have…

EAST AFRICA SEEMS TO HAVE DRAWN the short straw in the weather stakes. As Mozambique mops up after the deluge that swamped the country in February, the famine-struck Horn of Africa is tightening its belt once more and praying for rain. The monsoon of the southern Indian Ocean is the system responsible for dealing this unfair climatic hand. Early each year, low-pressure storms loaded with moisture line up for their southwesterly march across the ocean towards the continent. Sometimes they…

The Climate Change Levy has been recognised by many as an incentive to look at energy usage and reduce it, and it has certainly focussed minds at boardroom level. As a result of the Levy negotiations we have organised many site visits to inform the talks and from those visits industry and Government has learnt that:
* Some companies have effective monitoring systems in place. But other companies do not and they need to build up a much better picture…

Scientists have always known about it. They had been measuring atmospheric [CO.sub.2] at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory, and by 1983 they were seriously worried about Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases are the stuff of life; they are essential to the biosphere because they trap and hold heat from the sun’s radiation. However, massively increased volumes of them were causing a warming trend over the Earth’s surface.
Soon, the Environmental Protection Agency was soberly reporting, in stiff bureaucratese, that…